Wolfen (1981)

Taking place in the 1981 South Bronx, which was a collapsed urban hellscape naturally ideal for horror movies, it opens in first-person Predator thermal vision view: solarized and purple-tinted. The Predator wolf eats two Rockefeller-esque ultra-rich property developers and their bodyguard when they go for a midnight stroll in The Battery.

Dewey, a gruff and frumpy former-cop (the head mobster from Miller's Crossing) is called in to investigate. I don't know if it was explained why they needed a former cop.

The rich guy had a ridiculous sci-fi private intelligence agency guarding him, with dozens of employees in a decked out remote surveillance bunker. We periodically check in on these guys as they monitor phone calls and pour over video footage and aggressively interview people who knew the rich couple, but ultimately the entire defense agency subplot has no bearing on the plot. It could have, and should have, all been skipped.

Dewey is teamed up with a lady cop, a coroner, and a wacky nutjob zoologist from the zoo (the reverend from recent WOLFtober screening, Late Phases). Another body turns up, this one on a construction site in the South Bronx, sending our team uptown to the bombed out post-fire projects. Dewey takes lady cop Rebecca to an abandoned church, hears a faint wolf howl, and then yanks her violently down the stairs such that she's lucky to even be alive; neither of them says a word about it. He unassuredly blames it on "kids? junkies?" when they hit a dive bar later, with Tom Waits playing in the background.

Not saying a word about it isn't terribly unusual for this film. There are long periods of conversational lulls. Awkwardly long stretches when nobody speaks, even in situations where normal humans would definitely speak. It's certainly not that they can't speak, though; there are plenty of conversational periods, too, which are written and delivered well.

A wolf, in first-person Predator mode, tails them all the way from the bombed out Bronx church to midtown, killing one unlucky random guy by tossing him off of the Manhattan Bridge. The weird zoologist identifies wolf hairs on all of the bodies. He watches movies of hunters killing wolves and cries, rides around the zoo on a little motorbike, and gets eaten by a wolf.

The security agency blames the murders on a Native American activist who was in the vicinity. Dewey goes to investigate, and it digs into some weird redsploitation; Dewey finds a bunch of Natives claiming to be shape-shifters, follows them at night, and finds the main one naked and howling at the moon.

Dewey and the coroner start getting more paranoid than the plot calls for, and go wolf hunting in the Bronx with ridiculously fancy hunting equipment. Somehow they can speak to each other across long distances without any visible headsets. They act like absolute incompetent idiots on their hunt, and the coroner gets eaten for his trouble. We get to see a wolf properly for the first time, and a wolf it is, albeit with an extra angry mouth.

A shaken and glass-eyed Dewey doesn't report it to anyone, but instead heads down to the Native American drinking hole where all of our favorite Natives happen to be. They fulfill the natives-explain-the-mythical-evil-to-the-white-guy trope, explaining that Natives and the wolfen used to live together with "nature in balance," then the white man mess it all up, and now the wolfen live in urban slums. "Animals? … they might be gods," they say.

Dewey explains it back to us: the wolfen have to protect their hunting grounds – the slums of the Bronx – by murdering the property developers who are working on restoring the neighborhood. A whole pack of wolfen surround the cops, decapitating the one who runs.

The most unnecessary car explosion of the week follows (even though was this week). Dewey convinces the wolves to leave by smashing the property developer's model of the new Bronx, indicating that both he and the wolf gods think the plastic model was literally the plan.

It ends with a bunch of Natives standing stoically atop the Manhattan Bridge, and a voiceover telling us to be one with nature.